Cures for some autistic children - for real

[Beth]

A neuroscientist who thought it would be a good idea to look at the brains of autistic children has discovered that some children diagnosed with autism (less than half, but a sizable percentage) and other behavior disorders are actually suffering small brain seizures.

http://www.ted.com/talks/aditi_shankardass_a_second_opinion_on_learning_disorders.html

She's able to diagnose and cure their behavior disorder by properly treating it as a seizure disorder.

This is why I love science.

 

[Dancing David]

Or is it another pallative treatment?

ETA: When she gets to PubMed with her study that shows seizures disorders are misdiganosed as autism, I will read them. Is she in JAMA or any other sources, she does not appear in PubMed?

very disappointing.

 

[TobiasTheViking]

Sounds too good to be true. Thus probably is.

I second the pubmed.

 

[Maia]

I found this link, where a blogger talked about the same problem. She couldn't find any trace of an actual study linked to this idea (and I couldn't find it in Pubmed either.) The only thing I could find by Shankardass was this paper, An Investigation into the Visual and Auditory Processing Mechanisms Impaired in Dyslexia using Event Related Brain Potentials, which wasn't talking about the same thing at all.

Overall, it sounds like a fascinating idea that may or may not have some substance to it, but needs much more research to back it up before the positive media coverage can be justified. The other thing is that you do have to wonder if it's really kind of meant to advertise the instititute she works at.

 

[Complexity]

I don't think autism, especially the wide spectrum of syndromes classified as autism, are merely misdiagnosed seizures.

Perhaps some seizure activity is present some of the time in some autism cases, but I suspect such seizures would be symptoms rather than causes.

It sounds rather simplistic.

 

[ben m]

I don't think autism, especially the wide spectrum of syndromes classified as autism, are merely misdiagnosed seizures.

ASD is indeed a syndrome (i.e. a set of symptoms) whose cause or causes are unknown. It's possible that there are several distinct causes, each acting in some patients and not in others. It's possible that one of the causes, responsible for some of the patients, is a seizure disorder that's treatable with seizure medication.

That's different than saying "autism is misdiagnosed seizures" or "Topamax (or whatever) cures autism".


Of course, if this is for real, AND if this sub-species of autism is at all common, I'm surprised that it's being discovered only in 2010; how did thousands of neurologists miss this over the past 20 years? Can anyone fill me in---wouldn't a doctor normally (or commonly) do an EEG when a kid comes in with development problems? Is "patient did not respond to seizure meds" ever part of the diagnosis?

(Also: I feel like I've read about historic examples of this sort of thing---"we used to think all X was the same, but it turned out that 90% were Y and 10% were Z and we can cure the Z" but no actual examples spring to mind.)

 

[Dancing David]

I don't think autism, especially the wide spectrum of syndromes classified as autism, are merely misdiagnosed seizures.

Perhaps some seizure activity is present some of the time in some autism cases, but I suspect such seizures would be symptoms rather than causes.

It sounds rather simplistic.

And sadly it is not uncommon to treat co-morbid features without being able to treat the autism.

 

[Dancing David]

ASD is indeed a syndrome (i.e. a set of symptoms) whose cause or causes are unknown. It's possible that there are several distinct causes, each acting in some patients and not in others. It's possible that one of the causes, responsible for some of the patients, is a seizure disorder that's treatable with seizure medication.

That's different than saying "autism is misdiagnosed seizures" or "Topamax (or whatever) cures autism".


Of course, if this is for real, AND if this sub-species of autism is at all common, I'm surprised that it's being discovered only in 2010; how did thousands of neurologists miss this over the past 20 years? Can anyone fill me in---wouldn't a doctor normally (or commonly) do an EEG when a kid comes in with development problems? Is "patient did not respond to seizure meds" ever part of the diagnosis?

(Also: I feel like I've read about historic examples of this sort of thing---"we used to think all X was the same, but it turned out that 90% were Y and 10% were Z and we can cure the Z" but no actual examples spring to mind.)

No a neurological workup would not be that common unless there were signs of a seizure disorder.

 

[Chris Haynes]

...She's able to diagnose and cure their behavior disorder by properly treating it as a seizure disorder.

This is why I love science.

The main problem is that treating seizure disorders is not always easy. There are many, many kinds of seizure disorders and some people do not find a sufficient treatment.

I did not look at the video, but one of the conditions my son was checked for almost twenty years ago is Landau-Kleffner Syndrome. It is a seizure disorder where the they mostly occur during sleep, and cause loss of language and it would seem some autistic behaviors. My son did not have that, and we were fortunate in that the phenobarbital was effective in treading his seizures and he could weaned off before he was a year old. He did have another seizure, but that was attributed to an illness.

In my son's special ed. program was a child who had his first seizure while at the school. But his were mostly treatable (even with medication he would have seizures, the problem with his seizures is that they disrupted his breathing... he literally stopped breathing).

The problem was that his younger brother also had a seizure disorder, which turned out to LKS. He ended up having surgery for the seizures (it may have been the one mentioned in the linked article), but he was still very affected by the loss of language.